Surface Book 2 Loses Power During Gaming

Wednesday, 22 November 2017 14:47
Written by Benjamin "Zeus" Heide

While it's no big deal when you're unplugged and your device loses power when using it, the fact that the new Microsoft Surface Book 2 can't stay charged when plugged in during gaming is actually a pretty big deal. The Surface Book 2 has an NVIDIA 1060 graphics card and it's actually no slouch at gaming at all, but when you are using a high performance power mode, combined with a heavy load, the charger and circutry can't keep up to the demand and your batteries will slowly drain. That's not good and Microsoft will likely "fix" this by lowering the clock speed and amount of power it uses - rather than providing a true fix for the charging capabilities. In my opinion, this is completely unacceptable.

You'll also need the "best performance" setting for GPU-intensive games, as they'll slow down or drop frames otherwise. The problem is that select titles like Destiny 2 use the NVIDIA chip nearly continuously, pulling up to 70 watts of power on top of the 35 watt CPU. Unfortunately, the Surface Book comes with a 102-watt charger, and only about 95 watts of that reaches the device, the Verge points out.